November 15, 2002

Teaching for Wisdom

From Education Week comes an article by Robert Sternberg, one of my favorite educational psychologists. It gives order to some fuzzy thoughts I've been having lately.

"The road to teaching for wisdom is bound to be a rocky one. First, entrenched educational structures, whatever they may be, are difficult to change. Wisdom is not taught in schools. In general, it is not even discussed."

True enough. I remember that David McClelland did some work on teaching for wisdom long ago. Sternberg's at Yale and McClelland was at Harvard, and the latter got interested in this topic by contemplating the worth of a liberal arts education. The only trace of McClelland's work I can find on the web is his 1981 book New Case for Liberal Arts. As for Sternberg, here's a description of his grant studying wisdom. I also came upon an interesting overview of wisdom from a conference in the UK.

This would be an interesting new direction to take with WebQuests, I think. It would be a lot heavier on the quest part and only incidentally about the web. Hmmm.